1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a chip card fitted with a sophisticated counting device. It aims at facilitating the use of chip cards or, more generally, portable objects associated with a chip, in increasingly diversified domains, this utilization becoming more powerful and more rapid.
2. Related Background
In the field of portable objects with chips, the chips are provided with various counters. More conventionally unit counters representative of the units of possible consumption, even money, are known. Bonus counters are also known which count the points of development of the customer""s loyalty granted by a service provider to a user. This grant can be made to the prorata of the consumption of a service by a user, the user""s visits to an organization, a retailer""s, or even his presence in certain places.
The counters can have various shapes. They can be material counters or software counters. A material counter is a counter in which, as for a scoring board, the switching of a counter from an initial state to a final state includes intermediate states representative of the intermediate values between the initial value and the final value. Counting software mainly consists of a recording, a value and an algorithm implemented by a microprocessor. The principle of the modification of counting software consists in reading a date of value by reading the recording, in modifying the data resulting from this reading depending on the algorithm, (in general it is an addition or any other mathematical operation), and in rewriting the new calculated value where it has been recorded. The invention will mainly concern the counting software but it could also apply to the material counters.
For safety reasons, during the counting operation the counter state is transmitted by the chip card to a chip card reader which reads this card. The programs of the reader implement the algorithm and when done, cause the recording of the new value in the memory of the card chip. This solution is very flexible; the readers are provided with an operating system which allow them to fulfill these functions.
However, the disadvantage of this embodiment is that the transaction is slow, numerous verifications are required between the emitter (reader) and the receiver (chip card). In the given field of the contactless card where the electric current is provided to the card by a radioelectrical emission, these numerous exchanges are slow and particularly difficult to implement.
In the invention, this problem of limiting the number of exchanges is solved by providing the chip card with a recording of rules which associate counters and instructions to modify these counters. Preferably, the chip card is provided with a memory which contains these modification instructions, and a microprocessor which implements them.
Accordingly, the object of this invention is a chip card in which the chip is provided with a counting device comprising at least one counter, characterized in that the counting device includes a file of rules each recording of which includes at least one data sheet associating the identification of a counter with instructions to modify this counter.